This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Justice Robin Camp should resign: Editorial

It’s taken a year. But at last a five-member disciplinary panel of the Canadian Judicial Council has unanimously recommended that Federal Court Justice Robin Camp should be fired.

And so he should be.

Justice Robin Camp. (Federal Court of Canada / Andrew Balfour)

When he was presiding over a rape case in 2014 in Alberta Provincial Court, the judge asked the 19-year-old female complainant questions such as: “Why couldn’t you just keep your knees together?” and “Why didn’t you just sink your bottom down into the basin so he couldn’t penetrate you?” He even asked why “she allowed the sex to happen if she didn’t want it.”

He also called the complainant the “accused” throughout the trial, and gave this helpful piece of advice when she testified she was in physical pain during the alleged assault: “Sex and pain sometimes go together . . . that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

Despite the panel’s sensible ruling, it’s not all over for Justice Camp. Their decision is just the first step toward him losing his job. Now a larger group of chief and associate chief justices must agree with the ruling and, if they do, send it on to Parliament where it will be voted on by the House of Commons and the Senate.

Article Continued Below

Justice Camp should save everyone the trouble and simply resign.

That’s what two other judges, Jean Bienvenue and Paul Cosgrove, did when the judicial council recommended they be dismissed.

While the arduous process required to fire a judge is an important bulwark of democracy, this is a case where there can be no doubt the judge must go.

His remarks to the complainant were so harsh that she told the hearing she had contemplated suicide after the initial trial. (An appeal court sent her case back for a new trial in which a verdict has yet to be delivered.)

Meanwhile, the panel concluded that Justice Camp’s conduct was “so manifestly and profoundly destructive of the concept of impartiality” that the public could have no confidence in him.

In an attempt to save his job, the judge publicly apologized and underwent sensitivity training with a Superior Court judge, a psychologist and an expert in sexual assault law.

It’s not enough. Justice Camp undermined every attempt the courts have made over many years to discredit myths and stereotypes about women and rape. By doing so he damaged the trust that victims must have in the courts. It’s time for him to go.

More from The Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com